For some time now in the ready-made clothing industry, it has been found desirable to feed cut textile sheets automatically to processing units, e.g. stitching machines. It is usual in such processes for the size cut sheets to be separated one by one from sheet stacks and slid in correct alignment and orientation into the processing unit, e.g. the stitching heads. Applicant has developed apparatuses which separate the sheets without error and subsequently transport them in correct position to the processing unit. Descriptions of such separating and processing methods and automatic feeding apparatuses for flexible sheets are known from U.S. Pat. No. 3,981,495 and from U.S. Pat. No. 4,348,018. These apparatuses comprise a table located under a number of pick-up heads, on which table the sheet stacks are deposited manually against suitable stops or into a receptacle. Each time a sheet stack has been processed by the separating device, a new stack must be manually and accurately fed into the machine; quite often this is a time-consuming procedure requiring extra attention from the machine-operators. Moreover, whenever sheet stacks with other shapes or sizes must be processed, it is necessary to change the moulds or adjust the stops for the stack side edges. Sometimes, in case of thick stacks, it is also difficult to maintain the square alignment of the stacks when they are repeatedly compressed by the pick-up heads near one edge only to spring back upwards when the sheets are being separated. Indeed, in this case, they tend to incline progressively towards this pick-up edge and sometimes even to curl inwardly at their upper sides thus getting stuck against the vertical stops or mould plates near this pick-up edge so that error free separation is impeded. This difficulty mainly arises with stacks of considerable dimensions, such as e.g. shirt backs, or very small dimensions, such as e.g. belts.
The invention now provides a process and apparatus which eliminate this manual operation and the associated drawbacks, such as additional workload for the operator and inaccurate processing. At the same time, the measures according to the invention quite surprisingly offer the separation process increased reliability, particularly with regard to the mutual separation between the stack and the sheet to be removed.